I think they're trying to tie the various releases together with the Ultimate/Advanced nomenclature. My point was that I suspect Campaign Handbook, Combat Handbook, Magic Handbook, Race Handbook, Equipment Handbook... is going to get equally tedious.

Perhaps there's no need to have a clear naming convention, but given that's a goal (not that it's been confirmed by an official Paizonite, of course), I think it's difficult for it to not start to sound repetitive and annoying.

For my part I take the "Ultimate" books to be "this is all you need on this topic - we're not going to do much more in the way of fully fledged rulebooks" and the "Advanced" to be a warning that it's probably not for every game. I have no idea if that's the point they're trying to convey, but I dont think the words are meaningless or purely there for marketing purposes.

This sounds great! I've been hoping the info from Kingmaker would get compiled/updated somewhere in one handy volume (which, I'm also hoping, this is).

Might be too much to ask for, but if that's the case- I'd love to see some Kingdom Builder treatment for Oriental-style settings (ie, Tian-Xia). I know a lot of the buildings and roles would be easily transposed (if renamed), but it seems to me that there are some things that are more uniquely Asian that could be added for DMs and Players who are trying the Kingdom Building rules in an OA campaign. (Or other non-Western Medieval style buildings and roles, come to think of it).

Also, some building tiles representing Asian style buildings like the ones in Kingmaker would be cool (though I'm not sure if the tokens would be included in this product or not, since it's likely a hardcover.)

Another thought occurs to me; this would be a great lead-in for some kind of Epic/Mythic rules - providing the backbone for post-level 20 world building PCs. :)

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I wouldn’t mind seeing this, but I doubt it would happen as Paizo probably won't want to commit any Mythic rules for print until they are sure exactly where they are going with them.

What I read from Erik Mona in an interview he gave a few months back on reddit.com that they ‘think they have a good direction they want to go for Mythic rules, but still are working on them.’

But he made it pretty clear that Mythic rules are coming eventually. I am hoping for that announcement at this coming GenCon for a GenCon 2013 release, but I am thinking it will more realistically be a PaizoCon 2013 annoucement.

Here is the quote:

Quote:

Are we going to get an "Epic Level" rulebook of sorts? And will there be a module for taking the Test of the Starstone?

If yes to either, any idea when?

Erik Mona wrote:

YES! We will do this eventually, likely some time in the next couple of years. I must confess that the third edition epic-level rules have almost no "champions" at Paizo. The math underlying the d20 system rules gets shaky enough at the standard high levels, so simply patching another 20 levels on top of that with a bunch of uber feats and some lame monsters doesn't really work for us. We've been experimenting with a totally different concept that allows for the sort of high-octane "mythic" adventuring that we think fans of epic content want, but with a completely different mechanical approach. We're still in the concepting stage for how exactly this will work at the moment, but it's definitely something we will be getting around to in the relatively near future.

As for the Test of the Starstone, that's meant to bridge the gap between "mortal" and "demigod," and at present we're not exactly sure what level that should be. A proper treatment of this dungeon would probably be appropriate for the 20+ set, which means we need to create the rules for those types of characters before we can do justice to this idea.

As the inventor of the Test of the Starstone, however, I can say that we WILL do this at some point. My current Pathfinder campaign, "Kings of Abslom" (which all the other Paizo people participating in today's AMA have played) is sort of a long-form prelude to the Test of the Starstone, so this is definitely something we're thinking about and planning toward.

Agreed. The Kingmaker kingdom and army rules are a good start (and people on the forums have done amazing things with that seed), but they definitely have holes as they stand. Taking another look at those rules and expanding on them would be a great thing.

I hope the Kingdom rules will get an overhaul, so the magic item shop stacking is stopped cold. ^^

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Is this something that was in Kingmaker? I haven't played that, what does this mean?

Late reply, but the short form is:

1) In Kingmaker, you decide what buildings your kingdom builds.
2) Magic shops provide a lot of magic items for sale.
3) Having magic items for sale generates money for your kingdom.
4) There's no rules keeping you from making a city entirely full of magic shops.

Therefore, you just build magic shops (or other similar buildings) until you have infinite money.

It's more complicated than that, and somewhat harder to pull off (and almost impossible if your GM tries to impose anything that bears a passing semblance of realism), but that's the very-high-level summary of the problem from RAW.

I'm going to echo the hope that stronghold building rules are included, because my group inevitably wants to either build an HQ or salvage a bad guy's lair as an HQ.
Also, I will be watching for the first star of every night so that I can wish that the next day will be the day the good folks at Paizo decide to put up a play-test pdf for this book.